~ The Incorrigible Market Monetarist

The Powell Fed is boring

After years of having an intense purpose of interjection into the debate over monetary policy, lately I’ve been having trouble finding something that interests me regarding it to write about. I believe that this has something to do with the Powell Fed being quite boring, not to be confused with being a bore, which is actually a positive thing. Monetary policy is supposed to be boring!

This doesn’t mean that there is nothing left to criticize about “the regime,” of course. But a Fed chairman who publicly declines to be pressured into agreeing that we are dangerously close to having too many employed people or getting riled up about headline CPI above 2%, as Chairman Powell did at his press conference yesterday, takes the purpose (and fun) out of doing so almost entirely.

Alternatively, I could pick on bad Bloomberg articles like this one that includes a misleading graph of headline CPI with a dotted red line across the 2% mark that is labeled “Fed’s goal” when the Fed doesn’t target headline CPI (an entirely dangerous confusion that the Bloomberg editorial staff doesn’t seem to care about), pick on this one that makes no sense at all, or bring fund managers complaining about skills-mismatch up on the dajeeps’ deck for ridicule, but those would amount to taking potshots at pointless stupidity which is far from satisfying.

To some this may be a good thing, but at least for now, I am closer to speechless than ever.

Quotable Quotes

"The desire is there to do something about difficult problems, but because it is difficult to do something which would help solve them, people do something else instead." -- Dr. Madsen Pirie, Adam Smith Institute